"…it is possible to refuse to ask this ultimate question, to say as Russell once did: the universe is just there. This seems to me just as arbitrary as to say: dogs are just there. The difference is that we now know by hindsight that Darwin’s critics were irrational because we have familiarised ourselves with an answer to the question, how come there are dogs? We have not familiarised ourselves with the answer to the question, how come the world instead of nothing? but that does not make it any less arbitrary to refuse to ask it. To ask it is to enter on an exploration which Russell was simply refusing to do, as it seems to me. It is of course perfectly right to point out the mysteriousness of a question about everything, to point to the fact that we have no way of answering it, but that is by no means the same as saying it is an unaskable question. As Wittgenstein said ‘Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery’...
"It is clear that we reach out to, but do not reach, an answer to our ultimate question, how come anything instead of nothing? But we are able to exclude some answers. If God is whatever answers our question, how come everything then evidently he is not to be included amongst everything. God cannot be a thing, an existent among others. It is not possible that God and the universe should add up to make two.
"Again, if we are to speak of God as causing the existence of everything, it is clear that we must not mean that he makes the universe out of anything. Whatever creation means it is not a process of making.
"Again it is clear that God cannot interfere in the universe, not because he has not the power but because, so to speak, he has too much; to interfere you have to be an alternative to, or alongside, what you are interfering with. If God is the cause of everything, there is nothing that he is alongside.
Obviously God makes no difference to the universe; I mean by this that we do not appeal specifically to God to explain why the universe is this way rather than that, for this we need only appeal to explanations within the universe. For this reason there can, it seems to me, be no feature of the universe which indicates it is God-made. What God accounts for is that the universe is there instead of nothing. I have said that whatever God is, he is not a member of everything, not an inhabitant of the universe, not a thing or a kind of thing.
And I should add, I suppose, that it cannot be possible to ask of him, how come God instead of nothing? It must not be possible for him to be nothing. Not just in the sense that God must be imperishable, but that it must make no sense to consider that God might not be. Of course it is still possible to say, without manifest contradiction, ‘God might not be’, but that is because when we speak of God by using the word ‘God’, we do not understand what we mean, we have no concept of God; what governs our use of the word ‘God’ is not an understanding of what God is but the validity of a question about the world. That is why we are not protected by any logical laws from saying ‘God might not exist’ even though it makes no sense. What goes for our rules for the use of ‘God’ does not go for the God we try to name with the word. (And a corollary of this, incidentally, is why a famous argument for the existence of God called the ontological argument does not work.)..."
On Aug 5, 2012, at 12:27 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 5, 2012, at 12:48 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Here's the best account I know of the question that Holt (and a good number of other modern philosophers) raises. It's from the late Oxford philosopher/theologian Herbert McCabe (Terry Eagleton's teacher).
>>
>> http://newsfromneptune.com/2010/08/14/god-and-creation/
>>
>> "In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to
>> carry on an activity, to be engaged in research...
>
>> Gibberish. Nobody denies his right to carry on any intellectual activity he wishes or to research on any topic he wants. What does that have to do with the undefined and undefinable word "God" and the (in his sentence) undefined word "exists?"
>
>
>
> Shane Mage
>
>
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
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